


Now We Come to the Laughter

by orbitalsquabbles



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Major Character Katabasis, Multi, Necromancer Politics, Pre-Relationship, You Are Allowed To Want, being so afraid you come out the other side, girls just want to have fun (political statement), let Dulcinea Septimus say FUCK!!!!, the canonical structural fuckening of the nine houses, the inherent homoeroticism of having best friends you’ve never met, tltexchange2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28668252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orbitalsquabbles/pseuds/orbitalsquabbles
Summary: Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect had added six or seven years to the life of a frightened, dying girl. Now a dying woman went to meet them, shedding the girl, the fear, and the doubt.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Dulcinea Septimus/Palamedes Sextus, Dulcinea Septimus & Palamedes Sextus & Camilla Hect, some room for interpretation in relationships
Comments: 13
Kudos: 45





	Now We Come to the Laughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars/gifts).



> Written for searchforthescars, as part of the Locked Tomb Holiday Exchange 2020! Their prompt was for something about the real Dulcinea Septimus, with bonus points if it examined her nuanced relationship with the Sixth. I apologize for being a little bit late: this should have gone up yesterday, but I ended up adding to it last minute instead. I hope you like it!!!
> 
> I wrote this with pre-relationship Dulcinea/Camilla/Palamedes in mind, but I think it can be read as pretty much any desired combo of those three.
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS: Canon-typical terminal illness (& associated fluids) (& associated medical care), emotional/psychological abuse and manipulation within Dulcinea's family.

Dulcinea Septimus woke, very suddenly and quietly, at the hour before dawn in a bag-strewn room. Her mouth was dry, but only tasted a little bit like iron: success. The tube at her nostril was easily cleared. She took four pills from the capsule on her bedside and levered the bed up to look around. Then, all at once, the way a child does on the day of a festival, she remembered, and then a moment later again she remembered that she was allowed her excitements now.

“At _fucking_ last!” she said, and got out of bed at a reasonable pace only so no one else would have to come in yet.

Dulcinea stood at her bedroom window for the last time. Here was the city of Rhodes, which she had nominally ruled - the buildings beginning to gleam in the orange-tinted light of the day cycle, the workers far below, and far above, the engineering marvels that had allowed them to live here in beauty for ten thousand years. That night Dulcinea would cross that membrane upwards, through the atmosphere, to space: a medium free of life and death, but full of potential.

She crossed the room to her vanity, sat, and looked in the mirror briefly without seeing anything. It seemed to her that now that _death_ had come so close to her - now that it really would be only a few weeks, at most - all the fear had been stripped strangely away from it, and the change in herself was what she was now afraid of.

“This old thing again,” Dulcinea said in the mirror, and laughed, red tongue moving, first in her strange and sordid mirth, then in tussal stiffness. She pressed the button on the desk, so that her latest minder could rush in to check her tube (unnecessary) and otherwise assuage their worries that a dying woman might, in fact, be dying. As they worried at her she thought--

* * *

_You asked me to describe the stacks to you. Are you planning a heist, Dulcinea? It might be good for your spirit; the Warden would prescribe it to you._

_There are many stacks here. Nobody bothers with proposals to consolidate them. It would be too large, and we’d constantly lose necromancers down the shelves in the middle. The Warden’s traditional quarters are near the original rooms, the oldest ones. Since we can no longer keep our oldest objects there (other, more technologically advanced sections preserve them better) the texts are all things with sentimental value for those who make that kind of decision. The doors are made of wood, of all things. They were replaced eight hundred years ago as a frivolity._

_He doesn’t have any interest in old primers of necromantic fads (his description of their contents - not mine), so his quarters are exactly where you would expect them to be -_

* * *

\--poor Camilla! She hadn’t always called him _”the Warden.”_

Dulcinea fancied she could hear her serious voice saying it, for of course Camilla would have a serious voice. It would be a great burden for her to be so serious personally and _not_ have one.

The minder finished with her tube, and offered her the extra suspicious painkiller, which Dulcinea ritually declined. The light outside suggested day was quickly approaching, and she couldn’t spend all her time reclining in these final hours.

Off went her sleeping dress, and her minder respectfully stood with their back to the door of the sybaritic bathroom, with its floral perfumes and glossy soundtrack of raindrops and images of leaves. Dulcinea looked her last at it and breathed in the moist, warm air, and felt every inch of her body quiver, which honestly could have been too much standing just as easily as it could have been anticipation.

(She did still feel the anticipation, and savored it.)

Good-bye to the towels! Dulcinea thought giddily. Good-bye to this stupid rose-scented leg powder! Good-bye to using real water even though no one would let her see their water budget! How could she feel sick of all of this and sick of dying at the same time? Or sick of dying and yet -

But she was! She did feel this way. There was change alive in her now that she had finally crested that final hill.

The minder coughed, and then, a second later, Protesilaus coughed from the door to her suite: both of them unbearably proper, and neither of them sick.

“Don’t worry, I’m just woolgathering,” Dulcinea said. After all, she'd sat down on the bench in the tub, and therefore could not be criticised for over-straining herself.

“I understand,” Protesilaus said. If there was a little sadness in his voice, she did him the courtesy of not hearing it. She was very good at that.

Was it cruel to go to the First House to die? Dulcinea wondered as she scrubbed herself. To let Camilla and Palamedes see it? It was one of her only two arguments about the whole thing, and she answered it as she had from the beginning. Would it not also be cruel to not take this chance - to _SEE_ them?

She did not hope for more than seeing; she had already precluded herself from that. But to witness Palamedes Sextus doing all those stupid little things that people did! Cam would force him to eat necessary things that he hated, Dulcinea thought with gusto, wringing out the cloth in her slow and usual movements. Greens, probably. Would he ever touch Cam back? Surely he would, and after all of this she was so unbearably curious about what kind of touch the two of them would allow in public. Pal’s professionalism, after all, had always been so tender.

As she dressed with carefully impersonal help and Protesilaus standing his vigil by the door, Dulcinea considered the flood of potential the future suddenly held. Some things an isolated woman could not think of, or risk going mad. Now she had one hand on the gate and the other on the latch.

Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect had added six or seven years to the life of a frightened, dying girl. Now a dying woman went to meet them, shedding the girl, the fear, and the doubt.

* * *

She and her cavalier maneuvered around the ashes of her struggle from the previous day, suitcases lying defeated on the ground, gossamer trailing on careful-woven rugs, garment bags huddled together for comfort. This would all have to be finished by palace staff while they were out, but that was fine. She'd managed to throw most of the frilliest, most useless clothing down the laundry chute, and there was no way it could be dug out of the Palace’s workings in time, so she was completely free of it.

For-ever! Dulcinea felt all the _later_ of her time at Rhodes running out, and shifted in her wheelchair, grinning. Good-bye to the balls, good-bye to sitting and watching the dancers!

Pro loaded her delicately into the elevator and delicately out of the elevator and delicately onto the tram. They sat in comfortable silence in the otherwise-deserted car. It was reserved for members of her family, but very few of her family were both old enough to choose where to live and likely to choose to live near her, so the Palace of the Sunset was casually empty of companionship. Not for the first time, Dulcinea wished idly that one of her older cousins had wanted to move in. She had only had letters from Nausicaä for several years now - but it was rare for a Seventh noble to be a necromancer free of illness, and Nausicaä had been asked to enter Cohort service as soon as she was of age, so all her childhood dreams of a tiny, intimate court had remained childhood dreams. She rattled around the heir’s home like a shrunken nut in a vast, overgrown shell.

They disembarked at the Palace of Dominicus’ Revival. This, thankfully, was not the gaudy entrance meant for aweing visitors. Dulcinea could pass peacefully under the gently filigreed bones of ancient cavaliers without wondering about the economic power of melting down ten-foot-high doors made of precious metals. Protesilaus could pass peacefully under the bones of his forebears and sigh gracefully - about poetry or about the rose garden he had picked for his own burial, she wasn’t sure.

“The rose gardens?” she asked out loud.

 _“It is our sorrow. Shall it melt?...”_ he started to quote, but stopped, to hear her laugh.

A footman in deep green velvet shot through with violent pink held each of three doors for them, then bowed them into a sitting room ringed with a cheerful creek, complete with willows, blooming irises, and a horde of small, loud, rosy-cheeked children, who were clustering around the widest part of the stream to chase something back and forth. “Dulcinea!” cried a tall, spare woman, clambering around a pair of twins. One escaping dark curl, which had probably been left loose in an artful manner earlier that morning, had a glob of wax sticking it to her brocade collar. “How good of you to come by - we weren’t sure -”

The children had turned around when they heard _Dulcinea!_ , and there was now a long, slow-starting squeal of excitement as they processed, externalized, and migrated. Protesilaus braced himself.

“Dulcinea!” cried the swarm as it reached the wheelchair; “Aunt Dulcinea!” A little girl, giggling, was directed away from grabbing onto Dulcinea’s legs by a well-meaning older child. Everyone else went right around her to charge Protesilaus, who - for all his bracing - was a father himself, and was quickly dragged down by the giggling horde. “A cavalier must vanquish the enemy of their necromancer!” bellowed the eight year old in the lead, hanging onto his shoulder. A chorus of agreement rose from the other “cavaliers” besetting Dulcinea’s “enemy,” even the few that were remarkably scrawny.

“Come back at once!” Dulcinea cried, ignoring her own aunt’s wary look. “I won’t break if some of you hug _me,_ too!”

“We’re very good at our hugs,” said the redirector, who went to prove it gently.

“Yes,” said Dulcinea, and tightened her arms, “but I want - _this_ \- kind of hug!”

“I’m obliging!” sang the little girl from earlier, who had perhaps been taught the word that morning, and who obliged her right around the knees.

“That’s better. Oof!” Dulcinea said, and reveled in her own carelessness until her aunt took the girl away to set her back on the floor. With all love and respect to Pro’s children, he had trained them too well, and they were very delicate with her. If Dulcinea had ever thought herself strangely formed from her own family, all she had to do was look at their riotous children.

I don’t remember when this was trained out of me, she thought, and then, embarrassingly: all children springing from the Sixth House are for-ever of the Sixth House. Lucky that they could not see her discomfort as more than coughing!

When she was done, and the youngest children respectfully cleared away, and her tube carefully checked, and the porcelain spittoon tucked away again, and the dirtied cloths taken away by more deferential footmen, her aunt said, “so is this your farewell tour? We’ve heard a hundred different things about who would be going - you or Nausicaӓ or Cassilleus, or no one at all - or even the Dowager Grand! - and who knows what to think at this point?”

“Oh, I will be going!” said Dulcinea. “And I wonder at the amount of news you seem to have received, Aunt Forsythia, because I have always been the one going.” Her aunt winced at this, but held her tongue, which was why she had so many children over all of the time.

“When will you be back?” asked the bold eight-year-old, whose name was Pisistratus.

“I will not be coming back,” Dulcinea said gravely. “I am going to the First House to become a Lyctor, or to die there. So this will be the last time you and I see each other.”

“Oh,” said Pisistratus bravely.

“Dulcinea,” her aunt said chidingly. But when they made eye contact she looked away. Dulcinea thought there was no point in hiding death from a child of the Seventh’s ruling line: if they were not headed towards it quickly, their siblings or friends were.

“I don’t lie to you,” Dulcinea went on, “and I don’t want you to be waiting for me to come back. If I am a Lyctor, I will go join the Emperor and be his fist and gesture, or if I die, I will go to wait for the His whim in the River. I know that you remember when cousin Agapetos died last year.” (“Yes,” said Pisistratus, and the other children echoed him - even his glum tone, when she knew for a fact that some of them had already picked up their parents’ funeral zeal.) “Well, it will be the same for me, if I die. There will be a funeral, and you will have to walk in the procession. Great Aunt will say a lot of things. And then there will be something you do to remember me. Do you remember what you did for Agapetos?”

“Yes!” one of her cousins cried, “it was hyacinths!”

“You won’t plant hyacinths for me. I’ve had enough flowers! But I know exactly what I’d like best, so I am asking you to…” (She leaned in and rolled her chair a little closer, beckoning them in, building up to it.) “...run as fast as you can up and down the halls and scream and jump up and down and _ambush_ Protesilaus if he ever looks sad.”

“Lady,” Protesilaus protested. To any other eye, he would not have looked alarmed.

“Scream?” said Pisistratus. He had an enterprising gleam in his eye, as if he was about to corner the market on noise.

“Scream,” said Dulcinea with relish. “Very loudly. A lot. I would really appreciate that! Maybe I’ll be able to hear you from the River.”

“We’re going to be _very_ good at this,” Pisistratus promised.

“Will you show me before I have to go?” Dulcinea asked, and felt wicked and delighted at the noise Aunt Forsythia made.

The small cluster of children around her took off at the run, howling seven different things, like a charge of juvenile, sauce-stained wolves. Pisistratus was (somewhat unfairly) both largest and fastest, which meant that they all had to follow him, and he sprinted straight down the hallway that led to the offices. His voice rose above theirs:

_“Dulcinea! Dulcinea! Dulcinea!”_

and their yells fell into line, so that by the time they were out of sight, there was a solid battering ram of sound, of Dulcinea’s name, sprinting on little legs through the joints and ligaments of the Seventh House.

“Really,” said her Great Aunt Eutukhia from behind them. “Was that necessary, Dulcinea?”

Protesilaus obligingly swung the chair around as Aunt Forsythia twittered, “oh, Dowager Grand Duchess - ”

“Thank you, Forsythia,” Great Aunt Eutukhia said firmly. Forsythia slunk away towards the younger group of children.

 _“I_ think it was,” Dulcinea said. “Did you want to see me?”

“Does it matter?” her great aunt asked sardonically, but beckoned Protesilaus over to the inlaid door that led to her office. “I hope you won’t leave more of those filthy novels around this time. Just because you know what a sword marriage is does not mean anyone else needs to.”

“Thank you, Pro,” Dulcinea said as he situated her with a patch of light warming her lap. “You can leave us alone if you want.”

They both waited until her cavalier had bowed out. Eutukhia settled into her padded chair with a quiet huff. She had the same near-translucent skin as Dulcinea, but, owing to the fact that the worst sickness she’d ever had was the common cold, she wore it much better. At nearly seventy she was the picture of health. Her eyes snapped, her grip was strong, and - this was key - she did not have any tubes emerging from nose, mouth, or necromantically-anchored port.

“You know we prefer to draw a veil over the face of death,” Eutukhia said. This was an argument they had had before, and Dulcinea settled into it with the zeal of someone who was never going to have to put up with this shit again. “Better to cloak its mysteries.”

“I don’t think I would have been half so frightened if you and everyone else hadn’t been so mysterious about it when my parents were dying,” Dulcinea said. “Anyway, in this House, death would cough up phlegm on the veil.”

“Ah. Your parents.” Eutukhia shifted, trying to find a comfortable spot on a chair she had designed herself to be uncomfortable. “I do miss my nephew and his wife. They waited too late in life to marry, for two people with their genes, and much too late to have you. Foolish, to leave it so late - you were too young when they died. It changed you.”

“I personally would say that finding your father dead with lung in his mouth will change anyone--”

* * *

_I’m aware of the old rhyme:_ Six for the truth over solace in lies. _I don’t know how much of this solace is to be found in lies. It seems very thin and barren to me. An unfortunate last resort._

_It’s true that our consanguinity has grown over time, and no matter how much we have slowed it from its original exponential increase, we are still fighting a losing battle. There are two people in the Sixth House I could produce children with. They’re both adequate people. One day I will sign a contract with one of them and have children, or I won’t, because both of them have had children with someone else._

_The real blow comes for my hypothetical descendants. There are a few equally hypothetical paths for them to have descendants of their own, all slim. After that? The Sixth is at the cliff. Soon we will either have to loosen our reproductive requirements or find some alternate solution. None is forthcoming…_

_As for your question, yes, I could seek out a romantic relationship and ensure no chance of progeny. There are no strictures against this, although it’s frowned on. Some frivolities are more accepted by the Sixth than others. You give us your stories about lovers’ duels and gestures, and they aren’t our duels and gestures, but I love them wholeheartedly. I wish we had something to match them. Sixth citizens engaged in romantic interests either write research papers or invent their own devotions behind closed doors._

_Cam says that you were at Cypris. We have been receiving an absolute barrage of requests for ancient, fragile,_ unloanable _books from there. One of your nobles has decided based on a set of poetic references in a Third Millennia poet that there is an entire field of necromancy that we have neglected or forgotten (unclear which from his letters). It apparently concerns microflora, which would be very interesting, except that he claims this study will allow him to fight for days without eating, which is obviously spurious. Still, now that he has brought the topic to our attention…_

* * *

Pal was so rarely a twit that she’d had to read the whole letter over again four times, right after receiving it - but no, he’d simply missed what was right in front of his face. She commiserated with Camilla in her heart. It was very difficult to care for someone so disconcerned with themself in the twilight of their worlds.

“-- but it certainly would have helped to have a more normal understanding of death, such as our adults are sometimes allowed to form,” Dulcinea said.

“It’s served us well for ten thousand years,” Eutukhia said wistfully. “To think we lived to see the myriadic year of our Lord.”

“I know how disappointed you are, since I was supposed to die years ago,” Dulcinea said. Disappointed was an understatement. She had seen Eutukhia’s folder of state funeral plans. “A shame I’ll leave with all that tradition intact.”

“A blessing, you mean,” said Eutukhia. “I know you, waif! You’re an iconoclast. Disgusting. What you would have done with your hands on the reins - ”

“I expect it _was_ a blessing for you that I was going to die!” Dulcinea said fiercely. “If only I hadn’t run down the clock on you. I heard there were a lot of stories about who was leaving tonight. You poor fool, you named me as heir and they put my name and Pro’s name on the invitation. There was nothing you could have done - even if you did want to go yourself!”

She had to stop and cough afterwards, hands clenching around the arms of her wheelchair, wasted diaphragm screaming at her. Eutukhia sat motionless in her chair opposite, powerless for once in her long life. Her eyes gleamed with malevolence. She had hamstrung herself. “If only Cassilleus had worked with his own talent. He treats it like a monster under the bed, and he hides from it. The potential was there - he wasted it.”

“You scared him with it,” Dulcinea said, “and he never wanted to touch it again, because _it is frightening to have something in you that will end you._ And because fear is not that effective a motivator. I have never been more motivated, and I am going to die in three or four weeks, and I am having an amazing time, you wretch, because the Emperor wrote my name and I am leaving and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me anymore.”

“You wasted it, too,” Eutukhia said. “You only ever prolonged your own life, and never used the power of that slow death for anything else.”

“The power of the slow death is a total waste of time. I could have coughed a thousand lungs onto someone else and all I ever would have done was dirty their robes,” said Dulcinea. “Why you are all so obsessed with it I have never been sure. You obviously got on well without. We ought to have done like the Third or the Second, and found new power sources. Anyway, I am now about to accomplish more necromancy in a month or so than Cassilleus will in his whole lifetime, because thanks to you and the ideas you love, he lives in a house in the middle of nowhere and breeds tulips.”

“Cassilleus is very good at breeding tulips,” Eutukhia said.

“Yes, and an excellent heir it will make him, too,” said Dulcinea. “I love him, but stamen brushing does not a politician make.”

“Why I let you come into my office and natter,” murmured her great aunt. “Nausicaӓ should have been heir. It had to be one of you three: but only two of you had the gift, and you at least were a proper necromancer.”

“Yes, she should have been heir,” said Dulcinea, and coughed, for a long time. When she finally had to fish out a blockage with a long strand of cartilage, she hacked it directly onto the floor and kept going with her wrecked voice. “It is the tragedy of your entire life that you have clung so closely to our traditions to keep your hand in power. You displayed me like a hothouse flower exposed to space. All our children walk behind our coffins so that the rest of the Seventh can see how tragic they are. And they adore us for dying slowly!

“In my parents’ generation you chose no heir despite my father’s claim. In my generation, you chose me, because it looked good and because you knew I would never live to take your place. Now we come to the laughter. Who will take your place now? It will be an ineffectual heir, dead at forty, or Nausicaӓ, who you exiled to the Cohort. You never even let me have any of the training a heir needs, let alone her… Great Aunt Eutukhia, you are going to go down in our annals as a joke. You ruled for fifty years, and never bothered with a real successor.

“Do you know,” she said, not even cruelly, “once the three of us were born, you never could have won this? Even if you had chosen Nausicaӓ, and given her what she needed to succeed, and she had been called for this honor--”

* * *

_We received an invitation today from the Emperor. I trust you received the same, Duchess Septimus._

_My cavalier and I will be proceeding to the First House to study with the other heirs. I apologize that this puts us in an awkward position. Your letters have been sparing (I say this, obviously, without blame) and I know that what I asked was ultimately impossible and too honest of me. It is my hope that if you are to attend we can set it aside and study this highest aspiration together, as we have previously studied together from afar._

_Camilla looks forward to seeing you. Our best wishes for your health._

_Best regards,_

_PALAMEDES SEXTUS  
Master Warden  
Sixth House_

* * *

She imagines, sadly, that there may have been a version of that letter with a lot of scratched-out words. But she can only speculate on it.

“--you would still have been left with me on my deathbed and Cassilleus sweetly intractable. No Lyctor has ever returned to the Nine Houses. Because of Heptanary blood cancer, there would never have been an acceptable heir from my generation. You should have spent more time on the House and less on the cancer.” 

“You’ll be dead in a month,” Eutukhia said. “Look at the state of your chest. Goodbye, Dulcinea Septimus. I do not think that you will be a Lyctor.”

With that message of her irrelevance, her great aunt must have pulled a lever under her desk, because a footman opened the door, bowed, and at her gesture began to remove Dulcinea from the room. Dulcinea, who was also a duchess, paused him with a soft gesture and looked back at her house’s head.

“Good-bye, Aunt Eutukhia,” she said. “Ten thousand years of bleeding, and soon, we will be as defenseless as the Fourth.”

And she left, Protesilaus reclaiming his spot behind her chair. He was silent in the face of how hard she was thinking. “Kindly clean that up,” Eutukhia said to the footman from behind her, before the door closed.

This really was it for the Dowager Grand Duchess of Cypris. Dulcinea had been born; she had lived in Rhodes, or in dreadful cheery mountaintop sanatoria, mostly; she had been corralled and herded away from any meaningful contribution to her house; and now, having failed to produce another child with the same doom, she could not contribute any further. Her aunt had been right in all her assessments of Dulcinea so far, largely because she had ensured herself that they had come true. A strict end had been placed in Dulcinea’s way before she had even been born. If she was ever going to achieve anything she would have to find her way around some corner of that end.

 _“‘Look at the state of your chest,’”_ she muttered under her breath. “What’s worse than a nosy necromancer! Eurgh.”

A little slowly, so that she could have stopped him, Protesilaus laid his full, living hand on her shoulder. She laid hers over his.

They rode the lift down three floors before Dulcinea reached out and hit the button she wanted. The doors opened belatedly onto a huge indoor balcony, one of many stacked over each other. She could hear the hives of bureaucrats eating lunch above and below, but this level was completely empty. Across the empty space above the ground-floor atrium, the stained glass windows threw strange colors and figures back to those who helped administer and execute their empire.

The nice thing about this balcony, Dulcinea thought absentmindedly as she spat with delicacy into yet another rose-emblazoned handkerchief, was that she had only ever seen a handful of people there, and hardly any of them would interrupt her. This left her free to tremble, then shake her way through whatever it was she had to feel about all this.

“Look at me,” she said to her cavalier, and choked back laughter, looking at the spasm trapped in her fingers. “I’m still so afraid that only my body knows about it.”

He knelt for her, and for a minute or three, they clung to each other.

* * *

_Duchess Septimus,_

_You know that Palamedes struggles with the future. He’s inventive and ambitious. He’s slow to trust certainties, and he has a sharp eye for unreasonable traditions._

_He appreciated that you let him work with your illness when he started. He’s appreciated it since, every time it became hard for you, and no one could have possibly blamed you for calling a stop. You could have just rebuffed him at the beginning, but you let him try. I think if the two of you stopped now and never spoke again he would always be grateful for that. He would also prefer to continue speaking to you._

_With the recent letter, the certainties of the future are much less certain. You know that I go where he goes. That he will go where I do._

_Will you come with us?_

* * *

If the _two_ of you stopped now! thought Dulcinea. Oh, Cam. A serious, steady voice, surely, and serious, steady hands.

When the light had almost begun to dim, and the two of them had long since put themselves back together, the elevator door gave a reluctant _ding_ and opened. Out stepped Dulcinea’s little cousin Antilocha.

Antilocha was eleven to Dulcinea’s twenty-seven, but even at eleven, Dulcinea had not looked as freshly made as her. If you had compared the two of them side by side, Dulcinea would have been the faded wax figure to Antilocha’s reality. To compensate for this, Antilocha was famously mature. There were already frown lines forming, Dulcinea thought sadly, and unlike most of their family, she was perceptive enough to know that not all the wear was from solemnity.

“I’m glad we got to see you,” she said with genuine warmth. “I didn’t want to leave without it.”

Antilocha nodded. She was only five feet tall, Dulcinea thought, with a stab of agony. “Cousin.”

“Oh, come on!” Dulcinea said. “I remember when we were both fitted for our ballgowns, and you hated the tailor, so you hid under my skirts. Don’t start being formal with me now.”

“Dulcineaaaaaaaa,” Antilocha groaned. “I was _six.”_

“And a very smart six year old, too,” said Dulcinea, “you couldn’t have hid anywhere else in that room, and he was awful. How have you been lately?”

“No changes,” Antilocha said. “So that’s good. I heard I shouldn’t ask you that.”

“I expect you did,” Dulcinea said, “and probably a load of other bunk about my being mentally overcome at the thought of my impending death, or something stupid like that. I’m still dying, but I have had a lot of fun today.”

“And tonight you leave,” said Antilocha.

“And tonight I leave,” agreed Dulcinea. “Well! Now that I’ve shocked the rest of our family, what should I say to you?”

But rather than answer her, Antilocha’s face started to crumple a little around the eyes, and she hastily went to turn aside. Dulcinea neatly scooted the chair forward and caught her with a weakened arm around one waist, hauling her into a hug, which only worked because Antilocha wanted to go along with it.

“I know,” she whispered with her cheek laid against her arm. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I won’t be here anymore.”

“I was so angry at you,” Antilocha said blankly. As soon as she had been given effective permission to cry her urge to do so seemed to have disappeared, which wasn’t great. “And then dad said it was going to be tonight, and I wasn’t anymore. I don’t know why. I wish you were staying.”

“I know,” Dulcinea repeated sadly. “I always tried to buffer you a little from Eutukhia. I don’t know how well that worked, but I’m sorry to leave you in the mouth of the beast. She’ll probably pick you next, and if she’s smart, she’ll start training you to be the real heir.”

“You _are_ the real heir!” Antilocha hissed. Her fingers tightened on Dulcinea, then released. A good child of the Seventh did not bruise the fragile.

“After tonight, I won’t be,” Dulcinea said. Protesilaus shifted protestingly behind her, and she amended, “there will be a few people with me who consider me such. But you and I both know the truth.”

“I don’t want it to be me,” her cousin said. Her voice had gone bleak again, with all the fury drained out of her resignation. “I don’t want you to die.”

“You’ll have a lot longer than I did,” Dulcinea said to her, sudden desperation catching her by the mouth and rushing her words forward irrevocably. “Antilocha, do you know why I did all this? Why I held on to being heir, even when nothing came of it, and tried to disobey our aunt, and never used my own death for anything other than keeping myself alive? I didn’t want to die either. I was sick of it all by the time I was nine, and my parents were dead… I just wanted to not be in pain, or worry about how long I could walk or where I would fall. I wanted to go and see my friends and not think about how I would die soon. I wanted to be cured, and I knew that wasn’t possible. You are allowed to want your life.”

“Our blood is the gift of our house,” Antilocha protested.

“Our house holds the imperial governorship of hundreds of planets,” Dulcinea said. “We have mining rights on hundreds more that are no longer occupied. We have a full population, complete with necromancers, cavaliers, and a large number of poets. If anything happened to us, we could call in the thousands of debts, monetary and emotional, that other houses owe us. I am not a weak necromancer, and I have focused my whole life’s work on keeping myself alive, and with the help of two geniuses, I have won a scant few years. Don’t think I didn’t love them! But our cancer never contributed much to necromancy, or to our house. None of this ever had to happen. And we all ought to know it, or why could Aunt Eutukhia be head? All her failings come from the fact that she’s a power-hungry old prune, not from being healthy.”

“Cousin Dulcinea,” she said, voice unsteady, “I’m not as angry as you were. I’m not ready to hear this.”

Dulcinea gentled her hand and her voice. “I know. I’m sorry. I just - I want you to know the truth. You don’t have to do anything with it yet.”

“Okay,” Antilocha whispered. She felt her cousin gather herself. “Tell me.”

“I’d seen our doctors, and they’d given me their prognosis, and I eventually weaseled out exactly what would happen and what the treatments would be. They had me down to a science,” said Dulcinea. “And then a pair of eight year olds wrote me a letter asking if they could simply try and make it better for me… I didn’t tell them yes right away. I will confess to you that I didn’t think they could, even though they obviously did, and even though I want you to write to them for help when you are a little older. But the idea that it could be better was better for my lungs than anything else that anyone ever tried on me. Ant, I want you to know that power doesn’t come from necromancy or swordsmanship. Power comes from defining the future, and from finding ways to break the future open into new shapes.”

Antilocha stooped over and buried her cheek in Dulcinea’s hair so that she could tremble, overwhelmed, with company. “You’ll do well,” Dulcinea whispered to her. “I know you. You can do this. You’ll have your father, and your friends, and soon your cavalier. It’s okay that you have so much to learn - you’re a wonderful student. Aunt Eutukhia is a wretch, as everyone knows, and you’re our beloved little Ant.” (“I hate that nickname,” came Antilocha’s threadbare voice. “You’re trying to rile me.”) “I left letters for you, you know - they’re with cousin Nausicaӓ, and Pro’s family - and those will help you when you can get them… I may be gone, but there will be people who remember my name, and help you because of it.”

“You always tried so hard to help,” Antilocha said eventually, raising her head. “Even though you were dying the whole time.”

“I love you,” Dulcinea said. “That’s a very nice thing to say about your mean old crone of a cousin who is about to force your mood around.”

“Don’t you da _re--”_ Ant’s voice shot upwards in a squeal as she was too slow to get away, and fell prey to tickling hands. _”Pro!_ Help me!”

“Excuse me,” Protesilaus said gravely to his necromancer, and lifted her giggling cousin clear into the air. “My loyalties are clear.”

“So I see!” Dulcinea cried, turning the chair around. “Antilocha - really - I hope that every once in a while, you will have fun. That’s how I want to be remembered. As a fiend and an iconoclast who set Pisistratus’ group on our aunt and told all the older teens things they weren’t allowed to hear. When I was seven I set Uncle Phoibos’ red vest on fire, and I want it to be known that this was on purpose, and that I never changed a whit.”

“I love you too,” Antilocha said quietly. “I will try. Good-bye, Dulcinea.”

“Good-bye, Antilocha,” said Dulcinea.

“Do you know why I asked to become your cavalier?” Protesilaus said into the silence of the lift as it made its slow way back down to the tram.

“I wondered if my father had asked you to,” Dulcinea said after a pause. “But we never spoke about it. It didn’t feel like we needed to. I trusted your reasons - and you were always sweet to me.”

“No,” Protesilaus said. “I believe he had his eyes on one of your mother’s nephews. But when he died, I petitioned to stay and be your cavalier. Dulcie, you have always been the best qualities of this house. You were fiercer at twelve than I was at twenty-four, and you never listened for long when a fool told you to stop. When I was furious, and could not be, you were a fury for me. I hope the Emperor Undying is ready for you… woe betide those who are not!”

“You unbearable dork,” Dulcinea said, and burst into tears unexpectedly. “You should have stayed here!”

“Abandon a second necromancer, and leave you to meet the Sixth alone?” he asked. “No chance at all - no matter how difficult you are when it’s time to take your liver oil.”

* * *

They took the tram home, to a building that would shortly cease to be home. The household staff had indeed packed up everything that would be going: the letters Dulcinea read on bedrest to keep herself occupied, the variously tasteful and distasteful novels, the dresses that looked like nightgowns, the nightgowns that looked like dresses. Two crates of shoes. Five crates of medical equipment, with an itemized list, which Protesilaus meticulously went over while she changed and ate her prescription goo. A spare wheelchair. Pro’s belongings had been delivered during the day, and they stood guard by the door in readiness.

At the tenth hour of the evening, a footman told them respectfully that the shuttle had arrived and that loading had begun. At the eleventh hour, the pair of them sat ready at the entrance of her apartments.

"I hope you won't contradict me if I change our departure time in any resulting poetry," Protesilaus said. "Eleven thirty-six is not the most momentous number possible."

"This is why I wrote my own eulogy," Dulcinea sighed.

There was silence.

"Did you really?" Protesilaus asked.

“Cassilleus should have it by now. There are six bawdy jokes in it, and some sedition, and it ends with a recitation of swears. I do not intend to be stopped ever again,” Dulcinea said happily. “Great Aunt Eutukhia should be grateful! If I were here when I died, I would become an absolutely inexorcisable revenant.”

Protesilaus had to laugh quietly at that. “I don’t doubt it,” he said.

The two of them were silent for a few minutes, and then he added, “when you are Lyctor - what will you do?”

“I don’t even know if I will want to be a Lyctor,” said Dulcinea. “But for now… I have done what I can on the Seventh. I am already dead here. So I’ll do exactly what I’ve always wanted to do, and go and see my friends - and wait for the unfolding of the future.”

* * *

_Dearest Cam and Pal,_

_Of course I am coming. Nothing in the Nine Houses could keep me away. Bring all your most urgent curiosities, and I will be there to wipe your brows when you overheat of thinking, and bother you back into shape when you peter out._

_Time at last!_

_Love,_

_Dulcie_


End file.
